I see what you're saying, I just don't really see the point in bringing up America. Basically, what it seems like you're saying is "What if, for some completely irrelevant reason, this had instead happened in America? It wouldn't be as tragic."

On a similar note, I detest when people feel it's necessary to one-up other people when they're experiencing something traumatic. "Oh, you think this is bad? I've been in a worse situation - there, do you feel better now?"

The point was that America is a much younger country, and in terms of property loss losing something in America is much less nationally tragic than, say, losing a cathedral that's stood for 800 years... a building constructed 800 years ago, by people who existed 800 years in the past. That's almost unfathomable, and the cultural loss is wholly depressing. It's like losing a part of ourselves, our shared cultural history.

This quake was fairly shallow which makes a big difference. Comparing a 6.0 to a different 6.0 somewhere else isn't really the same. If they don't get alot of quakes there I'd say its safe to assume those old buildings aren't strengthened.

In this earthquake no people died of "old buildings" 4 men died while working night shift in modern wharehouses. Two Three women (an two old and a young one) died of heart attack because they were scared.

This topics is done to death in every 1st year philosophy class - what is the worth of a human life. There's no right or wrong answer. BordomBeThyName has raised a point/opinion, and if you don't agree with it, then you should counter it with another point - falling back on the crutch of a taboo that you personally feel is pretty weak.

Some thought experiments for you to run...

You're in the Louvre and there's a fire/explosion, you have to choose between saving the Mona Lisa, or dragging the unconscious person (a complete stranger) next to you to safety (in this scenario, it's strictly one or the other) - what do you do?

Same scenario as above, but you know the person is diagnosed with a terminal disease and is sure to die in 2 weeks.

Same scenario as the first, only the person is one of your parents.

Same scenario as the first, but the person is a convicted criminal with a history of violent sexual assaults against women.

Again - there's no right or wrong answers to these, thinking about your reactions in the scenarios is only meant to heighten your awareness of different values.

And what about the other scenarios? I'm just curious... the object of the lesson is to dissuade you from holding "absolutes" in your opinions and responses... so what about the stranger with two weeks to live? Would you "deprive" future generations of the Mona Lisa to give a stranger two weeks more of life? I'm not judging, just interested to see how far you'll push the paradigm...

The people who were alive during the reign of the Roman Empire are almost all forgotten, but the Pantheon is still standing, and is known by everyone in the western world. Don't get me wrong, people are great and any death is obviously a tragedy, but some things are bigger than us, aren't they? The things we make will be around a lot longer than we will.

Of course, that's coming from me with an engineering/architecture perspective. It's my job to overvalue architecture, and a lot of other people will place value on the things they like. As a whole, the important things will be remembered and the less important things won't.

Yeah i'm studying economics and law, so not exactly the artsy architect type but i've got something to say about buildings: they are like a giant tree that has grown and seen many human lives. A building is so much more than bricks and mortar, just like we are so much more than blood and flesh, a building is history. When you die the colosseum will be still be standing in all its might, and so will the Liberty Tower, and when your children die, so will they, and the children of your children die, and so on....All in all, human lives are so petty and short whereas a building stand for so long and conveys so much, the feelings of its builders, the graffito of workers from centuries ago, the context of an era long gone, one that we shouldn't forget, for we always seem to repeat our mistakes...These buildings show that long ago ago people were just like us, with the same flaws the same virtues, only in a different society, that we are not any better than them, something that many seem to think. These buildings are the symbol of the pride of some vain mens, of the greatness of other, these buildings have a life of their own.

If someone guarantees me not one single more person will die in an earthquake ever, I would agree all historic buildings of the world (except for hospitals that can save lives etc.) to be crushed into rubbles. Buildings can be rebuilt, human beings cannot.

People come and go, but buildings stay there. They represent our struggles and triumphs, and they last longer than anything we could ever hope to do. They're what we define our societies by, and what we remember the past by. If I say "Egypt", you think about the Pyramids. If I say "Greece", you think about the Parthenon. China? Great wall. The skyscrapers that we're putting up today are the apex of our human achievement; the best artists, engineers, businessmen and workers that we have come together to make something larger than the people themselves could ever be. The ancient brick buildings in Italy represented the same for them, and they're the only things that they made that are still standing. Of course buildings can be rebuilt, but never exactly like they were before. Architecture is a connection to thousands of people who we otherwise could never connect to.

Is it tragic that people die? Of course, but they're going to die eventually anyways. It's better to preserve the effects that people had on the world than to try to preserve the people themselves, because they can't be preserved. They're going to go away, and soon. You, me, the unfortunate Italians that passed away last night, we aren't going to stay around, but hopefully we'll have some lasting effect. Hopefully people in the future will care enough about that lasting effect and the people responsible for it, to preserve it and care for it. If we turn the past to rubble, than what's the point of trying to improve things for the future?

From the info I could find ( It 's in Italian ) this tower is called the Tower of the people of Modena (Torre del popolo di Modena) belonging to the noble family of Este who ruled the area of Emilia for about 8 centuries. It dates about 600 years, or even more.
(Sorry for the bad link, I'm typing this on the phone. If anyone finds more accurate infos, please do post)

Edit:okay read the thing more deeply: the tower was built in 1213, that makes it 799 years old

Tectonics is interesting. I suggest the Khan Academy videos on plate tectonics if you are interest. Indeed, I also suggest Wikipedia. Thank you for sharing. It's nice to place these next to the division of continents and to see the similarities of plates.

True, there are still volcanoes, but those are due to the subduction of a different plate (Tyrrhenian microplate, based on geochemistry evidence, I'm looking for an easily understood article to support this) than the one that caused the earthquake. I'm scanning through old power points and relevant articles to see if I have an diagram that explains this. As sad as the damage is that comes with any earthquake, geologists are going to be loving the opportunity to study the aftershocks to get a better understanding of what is going on in that region of Italy.

Coming from California EVERYTHING here is built to withstand an earthquake. Even a lot of our older buildings (although nowhere near the age of those buildings in Italy) are becoming retrofitted to be able to survive earthquake. Is there nothing countries like Italy, which has thousands of historical buildings, can do to help protect these buildings more? I know the buildings were made of brick and concrete but still is there nothing, big or small, that can help older buildings?

I agree. Japan has it's old buildings, but nothing like in Italy. I was in a 6.1 earthquake when I was in Tokyo last year and the only damage I saw where a few train lines shut down for the day.

Italy is just such a historic place and its old buildings wouldn't have been built to withstand a large earthquake. Newer buildings I'm guessing would be, but I don't know what the Italian building code is.

This is interesting. So, there seems to be a fault line along the Apennine Mts. and one cutting the Italian Peninsula in half. It is of interest to me how the Italian Peninsula formed along these fault lines.

Speaking of which it is amazing how much the BBC website has changed. Back then I was a tiny kid. My Dad read BBC online, I only probably glanced at a few. I liked paper back then. My Dad would take me to Starbucks because of the Internet there, and I would sit in these enormous chairs and looks at newspapers that were discarded. Many fond memories. I guess we all do from our childhood.

Carabinieri is an army branch (like Marine) with police duty in peace time. They have their General and respond directly to the Republic President. All other cited forces (Polizia ferroviaria, Polizia Locale, etc) are formerly Police forces which respond the Internal Affairs minister.

The difference is subtle but means that Carabienieri's big wheels doesn't change after an election.

Pardon my ignorance, but I live in Southern California and we had a 6.7 (or something close to that) here about a year or so ago around Easter. Nothing was even damaged here, and no deaths. Why did a weaker quake affect Italy so much more?

The simple answer, unreinforced masonry. Italy has a ton of old buildings and by old I mean they've been around since before the discovery of America. They aren't built anywhere close to the standards employed in America, especially on the west coast.

Like Japan and a lot of other earthquake prone regions a lot of building design takes into consideration earthquakes therefore these areas can experience magnitude 6 earthquakes and people don't even notice until they see it on the news. However when you get somewhere like Italy, lots of old buildings, or Haiti, terrible construction practices, even smaller earthquakes can cause serious amounts of damage.

I live in southern CA, and my workplace is a huge two-story lobby made almost entirely of glass, including most of the ceiling. If a big earthquake happens while I'm there, should I just kiss my ass goodbye? I think about it often, since I spend at least half my time there.

I, too, live and work in SoCal and have been safe despite the glass walls. In fact, I was working a graveyard shift in a data center years ago, felt a little dizzy for a moment and then the phones started ringing off the hook. Swimming pools were sloshing out, houses were being shaken around and blah, blah, blah (you know what happens) and yet I felt a bit dizzy without any damage anywhere (besides the idiot who didn't do a proper job of securing his hanging plant).

All (not 100% sure) new buildings with glass are (should be) laminated similar to a vehicle's windshield in order to avoid shattering glass that can be life threatening.

As everyone else has said, you should be fine. =)

Oh, I actually feel safer being at work during an earthquake than being at home since it was built in the early 50's.

There's no doubt my work is newer than my house. I think the center was built in the early 90s.

The last night-time earthquake I remember was 15-ish years ago. My pool was everywhere.

Anyway, you don't know how much this helps. I know earthquakes just come with living here, and I think they are cool from a scientific standpoint, but I can't help but succumb to a panic attack when they happen.

I feel like if it's a big enough quake, no amount of earthquake-proofing is going to keep buildings from toppling over, Roland Emmerich style. But that's just probably because I don't know much about earthquake prevention in buildings.

It's all about acceptable risk. If the ground underneath the building is torn asunder by a outrageously large earthquake then no amount of protection is going to help, but the chances of that happening are vanishingly small and not worth worrying about. You don't/can't build a structure to survive everything; you build it to survive what you expect it to endure during it's normal lifespan.

All modern buildings in the area are built to code and the code was written with typical earthquakes in mind with some amount of safety tolerance built-in. Killerzeit is very likely safer in his workplace than he is in home if a quake were to occur.

Also, the depth of an earthquake, and how close it is to the population center is a big factor.

Source: Lived through all of the Christchurch earthquakes.
Our biggest was a 7.1 further from the city, most damaging a 6.3 that struck pretty much directly under the city. All of our earthquakes have been incredibly shallow.

My heart goes out to all those in Italy, I know how tough it is. We just had another decentish aftershock yesterday, even now. Getting closer to 2 years since the first earthquake now.

there is also the grounds ability to transmit the earthquake forces and how deep the earthquake is that all change how severe the actual perceived earthquake is. From what I read the Haitian earth quake was so damaging in part because of the type of ground that it struck. Of course building practices affect the amount of damage too.

Yes, this is the reason. I'm from Chile and we have 6.x and 7.x quakes often, even a couple of times a year and there's never any estructural damage because it is known that this is a very "shaky" region.

An easy way of looking at it is that comparing just the number from the Richter Scale isn't a good way to compare earthquakes. Depth plays a major part, the ground, if the buildings are designed for earthquakes.

The Christchurch Earthquakes in New Zealand are a good example of how a low richter scale number can cause massive damage.

The Christchurch, New Zealand earthquakes recently were around that range also, however, they were extremely shallow, and led to something like a peak of 2g of horizontal acceleration. Stuff fell down.

A couple of factors. Those buildings that fell are likely super duper old. Older than anything in the U.S. That plus the intensity scale of the quake.

In Japan, earthquakes are measured by two scales: the Richter scale, which is a logarithmic scale up to ten. And the shindo scale, or "intensity degree" scale. The shindo scale goes up to seven.

The Richter is a measurement of the overall power of the quake. The shindo measures how intense the shaking was based on the location, namely the epicenter. Areas at the epicenter will have a higher number, and, generally, radiating outward like a bullseye the shindo numbers decrease in intensity.

Pardon my ignorance, but I live in Southern California and we had a 6.7 (or something close to that) here about a year or so ago around Easter. Nothing was even damaged here, and no deaths. Why did a weaker quake affect Italy so much more?

I think you're misremembering. 2011 was a quiet year in California and Mexico.

A major part of the equation that nobody has mentioned is the direction of shaking.

The Mexicali quake, like most California quakes, mostly shook side-to-side. This Italian earthquake was mostly vertical. Vertical acceleration does more damage than horizontal acceleration. Thus the much stronger earthquake did not do proportionally more damage.

Also I don't know whether this was the case or not, but magnitude alone can be a poor indicator of how strong an Earthquake was except at the epicenter. The Northridge quake was not that big comparatively to some other major quakes by magnitude alone, but the epicenter was extremely shallow and it had other characteristics like one of the fastest ground accelerations ever recorded.

So many beautiful buildings lost. Buildings of this age are very hard to maintain in a seismic area, it seems they weren't properly reinforced. Hope nobody got stuck under the rubble(Or died from it, I didn't exactly see a casualty list in that article).

This is terrible! Although, I've heard that being outside isn't necessarily any safer than being inside... I suppose if those folks were staying in an open area, yes, but being outside of already crumbling buildings is a ticket to have a brick fall on your head. I hope they pull through.

I was just in Abruzzo, in the region devastated by the 2010 earthquake. So many structures were still covered in supports, with no indication that they will be repaired anytime soon. I wonder if the rebuilding efforts will be as similarly fraught and mangled with a new government in power. I hope not.

eta clarification: It's notoriously difficult to get any new construction approved in Rome because of the city's history and plethora of subterranean ruins. If you dig 10 feet in any direction, you find remains of some old building or Catacomb, which the Roman historical preservation buffs will want to catalog and preserve, using as much government bureaucratic red tape as necessary.

Dairy industry officials say warehouses storing 300,000 wheels of Parmesan and Gran Padano, a similar cheese, had also collapsed. The cheeses' estimated value was more than 250 million euros ($320 million).

The thing with earthquakes is that they usually last but a few seconds so you won't have time to do much else but panic. At least that's what I did during the 2-3 quakes I experienced while living in an earthquake-prone area.

There's a long street in So Cal with a wide island in the middle. Many apartment buildings along the street were heavily damaged in the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and a lot of the residents camped out on the Island. Very strange sight to see.

Power lines are also a problem; many people don't notice how damn many there are hanging around overhead, especially in densely populated neighborhoods, and you sure as hell don't want one of those landing on you.

If there are no power lines or particularly tall buildings nearby though, I'm pretty sure it's far safer to stand outside during a quake.

Grab a pillow to hold above your head. Also bottle of water and mobile phone... If possible.

The only eartthquake I've been in was the 7.4 in Istanbul in 1999... All I could manage to grab was a deodorant that had just fallen off the bedside table... then I grabed and hung onto the frame of the front door. My wife jumped out of bed and hung onto me. Blind panic followed.

I literally can't believe the amount of people downvoting you, and upvoting these STUPID comments about running outside. Running outside will get you killed, it's ridiculous. If the quake is big enough to knock your house down then you aren't going to be able to run outside in the first place

Yeh I know! I live in Tokyo and the amount of earthquake safety talks I've had to sit through has really drilled it into the core of my brain. Also my friends mother saw people in Tokyo get killed last march by falling debris - and Tokyo was on the most part completely fine. So damn avoidable :/

The earthquake in VA was felt all the way up where I worked in upstate NY. After the initial shake (nobody knew wtf they should do) the wisdom from our higher ups said if another one should hit everyone immediately head outside as if it were a fire.

Now, the odds of an earthquake being felt that far up north are small enough, and a quake large enough to topple buildings is even smaller. No one listened to me as I tried explaining that if one were to hit, it would be far safer to get under our desks. You know, falling debris and all on the way out of the building. Hell, the stairs we would have no choice to take was surrounded almost completely by glass windows.

I'm studying abroad about 100km from the epicenter (no damage where I was), and being from the Midwest, the idea of the earth being less that solid is a rather alien concept. Everything shook for about 30 seconds, pretty unsettling stuff. Real shame about the lives and cultural losses.